Friday, November 30, 2012

Well, it's the end of November, and I finished my novel a day early. Or I should say, I finished 50k words. It's nowhere near finished. It has a start and an ending, but I mean... the middle is pretty weird, to say the least. There's more than a few loose ends. It's more like a tangled ball of string than a knitted sweater. If you know what I mean.

My progress graph.. got a little sketchy in the middle.

I've found Nanowrimo to be a very positive experience. If there's anyone out there who's dreamed of writing a novel, I'd urge them to sign up next year, even if it sounds impossible. It's totally possible, I just did it. I also did it with literally no planning. On October 31st, I was only just finished moving house. I had no time at all to think about it, and on November 1st I literally just opened a word document and wrote the first thing that came into my head. Somehow that turned into a story. And now I have 50k words of story.

Which is immense! For me, anyway. I've never, in any way written that many words before. Usually my stories peter out after about a paragraph. Let alone 90 pages.

Over the month I've really come to appreciate what the Nano website peeps do for us as well. They do it for no profit, it's free to sign up, and the only reason they do it is because they want heaps of people to write novels. They get famous and not-famous-but-inspiring writers to give pep talks throughout the month, which really keeps you going. They know how you're feeling, and they help all they can. I owe them, hardcore.

So I've written my first novel. It feels both better and not as exciting as I thought it would feel. There's a sense of awe that I always had for people who wrote novels, like it was this impossible thing that I would never achieve even though I longed to. It's kind of obvious now, but the first thing you notice is that it's actually very easy. You just keep writing. The hard part is writing anything good. That's where the not-so-exciting bit comes in. Most of it was pretty bad, and the plot is intensely holey.

But, you know. I had fun. My housemate got me a 1st novel cake. I wrote a novel. :)

Monday, November 19, 2012

My long, explainable absence from blogging and the internet in general has been interesting. Everyone who knows me already knows what was going on, but to recap - moved house and writing a novel. November is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, in which some crazy peeps try and write a whole novel in one month. Since the house-moving coincided exactly with the start of the month, let's just say it's been pretty insane so far. I doubt I'll be blogging again until the end of the month anyway, because it's pretty hardcore and I'm not the fastest writer. I've also never written this much on one piece in my life. That in itself feels pretty good. I'm just over halfway through it now, and this is definitely the hardest point. There are feelings of failure and resignation as the realisation sets in that the plot needs to be going somewhere now. But anyway, I'm still going to do it and hopefully finish on time, and I can rest and edit later.